Starbucks Goes Digital

As a New Yorker who desperately needs a caffeine fix to jumpstart her in the morning, I thank Starbucks for constantly working to speed up its lines and get coffee in my hands faster. Just yesterday it announced it will be implementing a free mobile card app on iPhones, iPod touches, and Blackberries in about 300 New York City and surrounding area stores. You'll be able to pay for your beverages and snacks by having a barcode on your phone screen scanned at the counter.

First tried in a handful of Starbucks in Seattle and Northern California in 2009, as well as 1000 Starbucks in Target stores, the app's been a huge success. Coffee lovers have been happy that it's faster and more convenient for them to get their jolts. Eliminating Starbucks cards is also environmentally friendly and cost effective for the company as it needs to produce fewer Starbucks cards. You can manage your Starbucks account through the app to add funds or check your balance or My Starbucks Rewards status; it's also handy for locating the nearest Starbucks. For those of you that would rather skip the lines altogether by brewing your own java, check out this Good Housekeeping video on brewing the perfect at home coffee.

Anyone else feel like we're going all Jetsons lately? Everywhere I turn I see these 2D digital barcodes - on issues of Popular Mechanics and other mags where they give readers more access to information, at the movies where you use paperless tickets from Fandango, at the airport where home-printed tickets expedite check-in, on business cards with scanable codes for saving contact information. The New York Times also recently featured an article on the dissemination of bar codes, Testing a Bar Code Technology for Smartphones. Pretty soon wallets will be a thing of the past and we won't need anything to carry anything around but a mobile phone---and a lipstick, of course.